Many Loyola students are saying Information Technology needs to get rid of Uncle Spam. Many students claim they receive too many solicitations and bogus offers through their Loyno e-mail accounts; some claim they receive these e-mails every day.

Brandon Sutton, theatre arts junior, said he gets “decent spam amounts” daily.

“I get credit card company solicitations, get rich quick schemes, male enhancement drug offers – you name it,” he said.

“These come daily or every other day, almost as much as my Facebook alerts.”

Carlos Miguel Vera, accounting sophomore, said he gets frequent updates from sites he doesn’t recognize and dating service ads almost every other day.

“I always get stuff about cars and things from adult friend-finder Web sites,” he said.

“I’ve never signed up for any of these, but I constantly get them.”

Mike Klein, IT’s system services manager, said spam amounts students receive are minimal in comparison to the amount the system’s spam blocker intercepts daily.

“We get, on average, about 110,000 messages a day,” he said.

“Almost all of these are spam, and the blocker knocks those out. However, 3,800 of those messages may come in too fast, and these are the spam e-mails some students are getting.”

Klein said each e-mail is reviewed on a point system that determines whether the student gets to see the message.

“Our filters look at the content of the e-mail, the sender and the language used inside of the e-mail,” he said.

“The system scores that on a one to 100 range. We block everything higher than two.”

According to Klein, some mail that falls between the range of one and two is “white-listed,” or marked as “possible spam.”

“When we white-list something it means we know where it’s coming from and we’re giving the option of deleting it to the user,” he said.

“These are usually things connected to Loyola, like PackTracks e-mails from http://www.loyno-students.com, and something you would e-mail yourself from a library database.”

The system also uses a “blacklist” feature, which automatically deletes e-mail students get based on the sender.

“These are going to be from your big spam house Web sites and known virus senders,” Klein said.

Klein said the best way to handle unwanted e-mails that do bypass the blocker is to hit the spam button.

“This will blacklist it, and you won’t get any more from that source,” he said.

Jessica Williams can be reached at [email protected].